The Background of Myxa
Today we launched Myxa, a portal for shopping guides that help consumers find the best tech & electronics products out there. But this post is about the background of the Myxa site….
The year is 1996. The early days of the Internet. On November 11, myxa.com goes live announcing a service to “help companies join the Internet and develop an on-line presence via the Web”. Those are the first records of the domain according to Archive.org’s Wayback machine. The Internet is so new, there is actually a section teaching people what the Internet is and why it’s valuable.
By 1999, the site is firmly focused on Unix, and will specialize in “Elm”, a Unix-based e-mail service.
Myxa’s ELM offering is so popular it is linked to by MIT, Stanford (and here), Duke, Northwestern, Brown (here, here, and here), Emory, and Hofstra.
The site has always had a focus on computer technology. While a service provider, Myxa provided helpful documentation on the UNIX ELM service and judging by the early content, assisted organizations in how to use the then-emerging technology. Or at least organizations such as corporations and universities were relatively new to it.
The site goes offline in 2011. And stays offline until now.
Myxa.com was a short, sweet domain and perfect for bringing back to host shopping guides that focus on what the site has been used for since it’s inception, technology. We hope to do the URL justice with insights into retail technology, especially talking with a kind of specificity about detailed consumer needs (such as 1 Terabyte Hard Drives for the Mac) — the kinds of granular information you won’t see on another Internet shopping guides. You can track our ever-growing list of tech shopping guides here.
